Evolutionary scientists all hail Charles Darwin as their founding-father, yet typically cite just one of his ideas: natural selection. Few clock that his theory of evolution – and his take on psychological topics – were rooted in a comprehensive understanding of organisms as agents. This understanding was eclipsed by the ‘gene’s-eye’ view of adaptation and species-change which gained an increasing strangle-hold over biology during the twentieth century – and hence, over both sociobiology and today’s ‘evolutionary psychology.’ Are current efforts to revise the gene's-eye view – emphasising ‘new’ topics like epigenetics, the plasticity of phenotypes, the importance of development in adaptation, and of ‘niche-building’ – simply rediscovering Darwin’s approach?

To answer this question, we will examine how Darwin’s experimental analyses of purposive movement in simpler organisms like vines and worms reflect in his take on such quintessentially human forms of agency as weeping, blushing, conscience, culture, aesthetic taste, sexual coquetry, and language.

Ben Bradley was educated at Oxford and Edinburgh and is currently emeritus professor of psychology at Charles Sturt University in New South Wales. With Jane Selby, he pioneered the group paradigm for studying sociability in infancy, showing that – even before they have formed their first ‘attachment’ – human babies are capable of ‘groupness’: interacting with and responding to more than one other person at the same time; simultaneously using several channels of communication; and developing unique meanings through their communication in all-infant trios and quartets. The only theory we know which predicts these findings is Charles Darwin’s. Ben’s books are Visions of Infancy (Polity, 1989), Psychology and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and, most recently, Darwin’s Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2020).